Marvel Has Met With Three Directors About A Stand-Alone BLACK WIDOW

While we received news of Star Trek finally hiring a woman (in Jessica Jones' SJ Clarkson) to helm an installment yesterday, there was a little tidbit in the report that also caught our eye. In the final 'graph of THR's story on Clarkson's new gig aboard the USS Enterprise came this nugget:

"Marvel Studios has been looking for a director to break its glass ceiling with Black Widow and has been meeting with filmmakers such as Deniz Gamze Erguven (the Turkish movie Mustang), Chloe Zhao (The Rider) and Amma Asante (A United Kingdom), among several others. That search is still ongoing, according to sources."

While the "among several others" certainly still gives us pause, these three choices are rather telling in how Marvel is approaching this material. First off, they're all women (duh). Second, none of them are American, as Erguven is Turkish, Zhao is Chinese, and Asante is English (and a person of color, no less). Pretty solid choices for a character who's a female Russian superspy, thus probably necessitating a non-American POV.

We've known that Marvel is committed to making a Black Widow movie work for some time, as they tapped Jac Schaeffer back in January to pen the picture. Schaeffer is the female scribe also hired to write Nasty Women, a new gender-flipped take on Dirty Rotten Scoundrels that stars Anne Hathaway.

Yet beyond anything else, the three women listed as directorial candidates are damn good filmmakers, as Mustang, The Rider, and A United Kingdom are very defined visions, filled with performances - from seasoned vets and even non-actors in the case of The Rider - that are just spectacular. If any of these women get the job, Natasha Romanoff is in damn good hands.

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Rising up from the sewers of Philadelphia, Jacob Knight is a man out of time currently residing in Austin, TX. When not lamenting the Disneyfication of our current culture, he's usually enjoying a whiskey, watching some form of disreputable trash cinema, or drunkenly perusing one of the few remaining video stores. No matter what, do not @ him.